Open Access is an initiative that allows immediate access—without registration, subscription, or payment—to digital educational, academic, scientific, or other types of material. This means that anyone can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full text of documents resulting from research, teaching, or artistic activity.
The aim is to eliminate the economic, legal, and technological barriers that hinder access to intellectual production, and in return, to achieve greater accessibility to documents and greater visibility for authors, since documents that are freely available are more frequently consulted and more likely to be cited.
Furthermore, scientific and technical knowledge and advances are distributed as widely as possible, thus returning to society the fruits of the investments made in scientific research.
He European Union Framework Programme for Research and Innovation Horizon Europe It stipulates that recipients of European funding must ensure open access to all peer-reviewed scientific publications related to the project's results. To this end, they must guarantee, at a minimum, that the publications can be read online, downloaded, and printed. Furthermore, they must facilitate free access to the data used in the research, making it easy to locate, accessible, interoperable, and reusable.
For its part, the Law 17/2022, of September 5, amending Law 14/2011, of June 1, on Science, Technology and Innovation, Article 37 states:
2. Research staff in the public sector or whose research activity is mainly funded by public funds and who choose to disseminate their research results in scientific publications, must deposit a copy of the final version accepted for publication and the data associated with it in open access institutional or thematic repositories, simultaneously with the date of publication
Authors have two paths to achieve Open Access:
- Publishing in Open Access journals (Golden Route), that is, journals that offer all their content openly.
- Publishing in journals that do not have Open Access policies, but subsequently hosting the texts in a repository (Green route)
Open access is perfectly compatible with copyright and intellectual property, since it is the rights holder who decides and explicitly establishes what users can and cannot do with their documents. This is indicated through the use of licenses such as Creative Commons.
Check out these infographics on open access created by REBIUN:
- Benefits of Open Access for the University
- Benefits of publishing in institutional repositories
- Advantages of repositories for the dissemination and visibility of research in Social Sciences and Humanities
- Versions of scientific articles and open access
- How to comply with open access mandates
- Protect your copyright against publishers
- How to use Creative Commons licenses
- Guidelines for the use of works in the public domain in Spain and other countries
- Open Science: Scientific research and data accessible and open to all citizens
- How to comply with the mandates on data management and publication in Horizon 2020
See also the Tutorial: "Control your rights, facilitate open access"«
We also recommend consulting the Guide to Open Educational Resources Prepared by the Library of the Carlos III University of Madrid.